Site objectives include advertising my name and marketable skills. It is very important to clearly show what my talents are to any potential future employers.

At this point in time, I am looking specifically for an internship. I am not certain if I am going to pursue graduate school yet, and I have one year of school left so I am not looking for a job at this point in time.

I am interested in working in the sports media field. My site will be geared towards showing off the work experience and skills I have in the following:

All web sites are created by people, for people. No web site is going to be used by a bank, car or restaurant. A web site is going to be used by individual people for a unique purpose.

It is obviously important to figure out your purpose when you first create your new web site, but the most important aspect to consider is your audience. Without your audience, your web site doesn’t mean anything.

How do you begin to understand your audience?

There are seven important guidelines to help you understand your audience:

List your major audiences.

Gather information about your audiences.

List major characteristics for each audience.

Gather your audiences’ questions, tasks, and stories.

Use your information to create personas.

Include the persona’s goals and tasks.

Use your information to write scenarios for your site.

You really have to delve deep and ask thought invoking questions to ensure that your web site creates the best user experience possible. It may seem like overkill to create a persona (or many) and delve into many aspects of that persona’s life, but you can never be too careful when creating a web site. If something is wrong, the user will abandon your site within seconds and go to a competitor’s.

A personal example for me is the sports writing I have recently begun working on for isportsweb. The creators of this web site had to really think about what kind of audience they wanted to write for. Obviously the target audience are sports fans, but they had to ask a few more questions before beginning to create an internet product.

What sports should be covered? Certain sports are more popular in the United States and definitely garner more attention.

Should the articles be incredibly in depth or allow the casual sports fan to enjoy them?

What teams should be covered? Different teams mean a different geographical audience.

User experience- the experience the product creates for the people who use it in the real world. User experience is not about the inner working of a product or service, but it is about how it works on the outside and when a person comes into contact with it (Garrett 6).

From Product Design to User Experience Design

There are essentially two ways to think about product design:

Aesthetic appeal

Functionality

It is very important to design a product to look appealing to potential consumers, but functionality is also crucial. It is difficult to determine what is more important. Obviously it is easy to say functionality is more important. Who would want to buy a product that doesn’t work that well? But many will admit that the product has to look good for them to buy it.

It is very important for a designer to think further than that and think of the user experience.

Designing (for) Experience: Use Matters

Use matters for a product. If a product doesn’t work or meet the satisfaction of the buyer then it is useless. It’s almost as if the product doesn’t exist. The more complex a product is, the more difficult it becomes to identify exactly how to deliver a successful experience to the user.

User Experience and the Web

On the Web, user experience is even more important than it is for other kinds of products (10). It is very important to have a user friendly web site that has no broken links or flaws. A broken link or mistake will easily turn away your readers. When things go wrong on the internet people blame themselves and feel stupid. Needless to say, this is an effective way to have people avoid your site in the future.

User experience is very important, but some web designers make costly mistakes in the hopes of being the first on the market. Speed and efficiency are great qualities, but hastiness that causes mistakes is not good at all for your site.

Good User Experience is Good Business

Communicate information on your web site as effectively as possible

If users have a bad experience, they won’t come back

User experience has a far greater effect on customer loyalty than features and function

It is important to know who your target audience is so you can deliver your message in the best way. This includes what medium you’re going to use and the actual content of your message.

Define document structure and links

The document or website you are constructing needs to be well organized and easily navigable. It is very important that each page is independent, but also clearly shows the overall theme of the document structure. Many articles are accessed directly through a search engine and not the homepage of your site. Hyperlinks should be relevant to the material and always work so as not to inconvenience the reader.

Define the style

A site needs guidelines for style and for creating screens that users will see.

Edit

Make sure the content, structure, links, visual design and writing style are good. Don’t just finish the product and THEN go back and edit. Edit while the product is being created. Some suggest editing content chunks in random order rather than in sequence so as to ensure a suitable and accessible organization for readers.

Copyedit

It is imperative to check consistency in visual design and to make sure every link works. The aesthetic nature of the website should be pleasing, and discrepancies in design can cause a reader to leave the website. Broken hyperlinks can also have that effect on a reader as it is very frustrating to have a link that doesn’t work pop up. As always, it is very important to correct spelling errors to ensure that all credibility is maintained.

Copyedit II

In addition to making sure the small aspects of the writing are correct, it is very important to make sure the whole thing is organized and focused as a whole.

Write headlines

Make sure the headline shows what the article is about and can stand alone without any background information. What is going to stick out and attract a click from a potential reader in a Google search?

Test usability

Act as if you’re the user and make sure everything makes sense and runs smoothly one last time.